Sortes: Bibliomancy Oracle

Sortes is the old custom of opening a book at random for a question and reading the first line you meet. The Romans did it with Virgil and Homer; later readers did it with the Psalter and the Gospels. This app holds those books whole and opens them for you.

Hold a question in mind, choose a book, and let it fall open. Every line has the same chance. The line you land on is shown inside its own passage, and the library opens at the same place so you can read on.

THE FIVE BOOKS
• The Aeneid in John Dryden's verse translation (1697)
• The Aeneid in Latin, with the standard line numbers every edition uses
• The Iliad and the Odyssey in Samuel Butler's prose (1898, 1900)
• The World English Bible
All bundled, all readable offline. No account, no network call for any text.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Open anywhere, or only in one part: a single book of the Aeneid, the Psalms, a Gospel
• Read every lot in its sentence, paragraph or verses, then read on in the library
• Search each book, with accents and case ignored
• A line of the day, the same on every phone, with an optional reminder
• Keep a private record of your questions and notes, on this phone only
• Share a passage as an image with its reference and translator
• Home-screen widget

THE LORE
Ten articles on the history of the custom: Virgil's own use of the word sortes, Clovis and the psalm at Tours, Augustine's "take up and read", what Gibbon and Aquinas wrote about lots, and how this app opens the book.

CAREFUL WITH THE WORDS
The texts are never edited. The Latin line numbers follow the edition's own markers, so Aeneid IV.346 here is IV.346 in any commentary. Dryden's lines are cited by his own count, never mapped onto Virgil's.

Your question stays on your device. It is never sent, shared or put on an image.

Free to install, with ads. A single one-time purchase removes them; every book and feature is free.